update Updated 15 May 2024
category Information Systems News
The Po River District has an extension of approximately 87,000 km², involving eight Italian regions, the Autonomous Province of Trento, and portions of extra-national territories in France, Switzerland, and San Marino. The territory is particularly complex from a geographical, environmental, anthropic, and socio-economic point of view.
Since 2009, the Po River Basin District Authority (AdbPo) has developed an informatic tool
to support the planning activities of water resource management: an integrated system for climate, hydrological, and hydraulic simulation, which makes it possible to reproduce the hydrological situation of the district in real-time, and at the same time to construct historical series of the hydrological quantities underlying the water balance. This system is also equipped with tools for forecasting lean or drought conditions and is therefore called
Drought Early Warning System (DEWS).
Quantifying the spatial variability of water availability in the whole river basin is, in fact,
deemed important for preparedness, especially in a changing climate scenario. For this reason, in 2021, the AdbPo undertook the implementation of the GEOframe modelling system on the whole territory of the district in accordance with the Unified Coordination
Group of M a g r e (GCU-M) to update the existing numerical; for water resource management. This is a completely opensource, semi-distributed conceptual hydrological
modelling system, developed by the University of Trento and characterised by high flexibility and modularity.
This modelling system enables the simulation of all the water balance components across the whole district. Besides, the water balance situation can be defined by means of quantitative indicators, useful to identify existing and potential criticalities of water availability, namely modifications of the natural volume regime (in the case of groundwater) or of runoff (in the case of surface water) of the water body, incompatible with rational, sustainable, and supportive water uses.